Conferencer vs pretalx — an honest comparison

What it costs

pretalx: Self-hosting free; hosted from €199 / event. Conferencer: $0.

pretalx: Self-hosting free; hosted from €199 / event; Hosted events are priced dynamically by expected attendees and ticket price, starting at €199 per event, with discounts of up to 25% for community events. Self-hosting costs nothing but the server — and, per the administrator documentation, wants Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, a cron runner and a reverse proxy.

Conferencer

$0, always

MIT licensed and self-hosted: no plan, no per-event fee, no limit on submissions, no share of your revenue. Your only bill is the box it runs on, and a $5 VPS covers it.

What pretalx is

Open-source conference management, from call for papers to schedule.

pretalx is open-source conference-management software covering the call for papers, review and talk selection, speaker communication and scheduling. You can self-host it free, or pay for hosting at pretalx.com. It is genuinely good at what it does, and if it fits your conference you should use it.

Who it is for: Community and free-software conferences, and teams comfortable running a Python stack.

Side by side

The same job, line by line.

The pretalx column states only what their own public pages state; the sources are linked at the foot of the page. The Conferencer column is checkable in the repository.

Conferencerpretalx

Licence

ConferencerMIT, self-hosted

pretalxOpen source, self-hosted or hosted for you

Published price

Conferencer$0 — MIT licensed, no plans, no per-event fee

pretalxSelf-hosting free; hosted from €199 per event, dynamic by size

Self-hosted stack

ConferencerNode 22, or one container with one volume

pretalxPython, PostgreSQL, Redis, a cron runner and a reverse proxy

Committee review

ConferencerMulti-round plans, anonymized rounds, 8 scorecard types, conflict-of-interest recusal, auto-distribution with caps

pretalxAnonymous or open review with a customizable rating process

After the schedule

ConferencerDecisions, onboarding tasks, versioned deliverables, a speaker CRM

pretalxTheir feature list runs from call for papers to schedule release

Public site

ConferencerA full public site — sessions, speakers, agenda, itinerary, gallery, personal .ics schedule — no login

pretalxSchedule and event pages, kept online after the event

API

ConferencerREST API with OpenAPI 3, HMAC-signed webhooks, embeds, HTML/JSON/XML/iCal feeds

pretalxFull API access

Where pretalx is genuinely better

A hosted option: If you do not want to run anything, pretalx.com hosts it for you from €199 per event. Conferencer is self-host only.
Battle-tested: PyCon, JuliaCon, MozFest and Write the Docs run on it, per their site. It has years of real conferences behind it.
Plugins and settings: "Everything can be changed", in their words — settings, plugins and a mature ecosystem around them.

Where Conferencer differs

The loop continues after the schedule: Decisions hand off to onboarding: each accepted speaker gets a portal and tasks — bio, headshot, slides — with versioned deliverables and a matrix to chase them in. Then a speaker CRM carries the relationship into your next event.
Self-hosting is one container: Node 22 and nothing else, or docker compose up with one volume. No Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, cron runner or reverse proxy to assemble.
The database is a file: One SQLite file holds every submission, score and decision; backups are a copy. No database server to run or migrate.

Sources for every claim about pretalx on this page, read on 12 August 2026: pretalx.com/p/pricing · pretalx.com. If a figure here has gone stale, the linked page is the truth.

Conferencer vs pretalx.

pretalx: Self-hosting free; hosted from €199 / event. Conferencer: $0.

Open-source conference management, from call for papers to schedule.

The same job, line by line.